(AP Photo\/Brynn Anderson)<\/p>\n
It looks like a record number of Super Bowl viewers stopped watching once Bad Bunny started his halftime performance on Sunday.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s according to a new report<\/a> from Front Office Sports on Wednesday, with reporter Ryan Glasspiegel explaining on X:<\/p>\n Based on my understanding of the data, Bad Bunny lost more [percentage] of the Super Bowl viewership from the end of the second quarter than has ever happened before.<\/p>\n His conclusion is based on quarter-hour ratings data from Nielsen.<\/p>\n Glasspiegel reported 135.9 million people were watching the NBC and Telemundo broadcasts between 8:00-8:14 p.m. ET on Sunday, before dropping to 128.2 million combined viewers between 8:15-8:29 p.m. That exodus of 7.7 million viewers lined up with the halftime show.<\/p>\n \u201cBad Bunny\u2019s performance occurred during the latter window,\u201d he explained. \u201cThis was a decline of 7% from the game\u2019s peak viewership of 137.9 million in the second quarter, and 5.7% from the immediately preceding quarter-hour.\u201d<\/p>\n The article noted that the audience typically increases for the halftime show during most Super Bowls, but last year\u2019s performance from Kendrick Lamar also took a dip when it shed 4% of viewers who were watching towards the end of the first half.<\/p>\n Glasspiegel also added a caveat by pointing out both the Seahawks-Patriots game this year and the Eagles-Chiefs game last year looked over by the time halftime began, which probably didn\u2019t help Bad Bunny or Kendrick Lamar. His article did not include Nielsen data on the 15-minute segment immediately following Bad Bunny\u2019s show.<\/p>\n Still, the 128.2 million viewers who watched Bad Bunny was still more than the 124.9 million viewers<\/a> that the Super Bowl broadcast averaged on Sunday. Nielsen data released on Tuesday showed this year\u2019s game averaged 2.8 million fewer viewers than the Eagles-Chiefs matchup in 2025; it also showed Kendrick Lamar\u2019s halftime show was watched by 5.3 million more people than Bad Bunny\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n As many have noticed, Bad Bunny was a controversial pick that divided a lot of viewers along partisan lines, with many supporters of President Donald Trump opting to watch Turning Point USA\u2019s \u201cAll-American\u201d halftime show instead.<\/p>\n Scores of Pro-MAGA viewers weren\u2019t thrilled that Bad Bunny\u2019s performance was entirely in Spanish, and it happened just a week after he bashed ICE<\/a> while making a speech at the Grammy Awards. Conservative media star Ben Shapiro praised the \u201cincredible\u201d staging<\/a> of Bad Bunny\u2019s show \u2014 which was set in a sugar cane field \u2014 while saying he wasn\u2019t as big of a fan of the \u201cplethora of butts on the screen.\u201d<\/p>\n President Trump was less charitable, branding the show \u201cterrible\u201d and saying it was a \u201cslap in the face\u201d<\/a> to Americans.<\/p>\n TPUSA\u2019s halftime show did pretty well, pulling in about 5 million live viewers during its peak, according to what Mediaite could see. Headline performer Kid Rock did get mocked by many people online for lip-syncing<\/a> his 1998 song \u201cBawitdaba,\u201d though.<\/p>\n The post Bad Bunny Reportedly Lost Record Slice of Super Bowl Viewers Heading Into Halftime Show<\/a> first appeared on Mediaite<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(AP Photo\/Brynn Anderson) It looks like a record number of Super Bowl viewers stopped watching once Bad Bunny…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[70481,7,73656,14458,10865,6,505],"class_list":{"0":"post-747454","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-bad-bunny","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-halftime-performance","11":"tag-halftime-show","12":"tag-kendrick-lamar","13":"tag-nfl","14":"tag-super-bowl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116058776399006628","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}